I got a little carried away this weekend extracting Japanese, English, German, and Spanish loanwords from the New Palauan–English Dictionary, ed. by Lewis S. Josephs (U. Hawaii Press, 1990). The nature of the words borrowed from each language tells a lot about the nature of the interactions between Palauans and their successive colonizers: Spain until 1899, Germany until 1914, Japan until 1945, and the U.S. after that. By 1940, there were 3 Japanese colonists (including Okinawans, Koreans, and Taiwanese) in the islands for each indigenous Palauan.

The current Palauan orthography originated under the Germans, but has continued to evolve since then. There are only five vowel symbols, i u e o a, but e represents the eh sound when stressed and the uh sound (schwa) when unstressed. Vowel length is indicated by doubling the vowel. Palatal and velar glides are written with the vowel symbols i and u.

Consonants show much greater variation. The obstruents /b/ and /d/ are basically voiced, but are devoiced next to other consonants or in word-final position. The obstruents /t/ and /k/ and are basically voiceless, and are strongly aspirated in word-final position. Glottal stop is written with a ch. The fricative /s/ is slightly palatalized (in the direction of sh). There are only two orthographic nasals, bilabial m and velar ng, but ng is pronounced [n] before the dental consonants t, d, s, and r. The flap /r/ and lateral /l/ can each be doubled, and the /l/ corresponds to /n/ in other related and unrelated languages. The consonants h and z are only found in loanwords.

The underlying morphology of Palauan is very complex, but looks a lot like that of Philippine and other western Austronesian languages once you correct for a lot of strange behavior on the part of the nasals (like infixed -l- and the me- prefixes that end up as o- on certain stems). Perhaps I’ll provide a few glimpses in a future blogpost.

Stu. To me it also seems intuitive that babii must be borrowed (note that I’m not a linguist). However, neither the Josephs nor Kerresel dictionary lists it as borrowed.

As for ‘choi,’ I suspect it’s native since ‘yes’ “doesn’t seem to be a concept that needs to be borrowed.” [this quote is from how Joel discusses ‘sueleb’ below.] Neither dictionary lists ‘choi’ as borrowed.

Wow, this is pretty awesome. Thanks for this. I’m currently in the process of trying to digitize, expand, and update the Josephs dictionary and this is a huge help. The biggest challenge is the data entry so this page is a great help. I was able to use mechanical turk to scrape a bunch of Palauan proverbs from the old McKnight paper but the PDF I have of Josephs is not legible enough to get decent accuracy in transcription.

Thank you for taking on such a challenge! You are most welcome to incorporate the list I have digitized here. I’ll see if it might be possible to get hold of a digital version of the structured dictionary files. A friend of mine has put online a number of Micronesian dictionaries, and a comprehensive Hawaiian dictionary. See the following URL.http://www.trussel2.com/index.html

Thank you so much. Unfortunately, I don’t see Palauan in your friend’s list. I’ve also emailed the author of the existing dictionary and he does not have a digital version unfortunately. More recently, the Belau Museum has published a P-P dictionary; I’ve been looking into whether they have a digital version of that. Perhaps I can ask your friend to at least link to http://tekinged.com.

Thanks again for the list of borrowed words! They are not yet incorporated because the python script to transfer from the html to the database is not quite done and I got distracted by my actual job. :) But I’ll have that done by the end of the weekend and put a link/ack to this blog post in the ‘Links’ page.

Thanks again Joel. I finished incorporating your words in the DB. In the main search results, I haven’t yet decided how to indicate origin, but I’ll add that soon. So the words show up in the search results, there is just not yet any indication of origin. I did add simple ways to show the list of borrowed words though, and I added a link to this blog post in the link page: